Technical Note—Optimal Scheduling of Periodic Activities

This paper studies the scheduling of multiple activities that require periodic processing on a single facility for an infinite horizon. It first formulates this scheduling problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) model, and then uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem to efficiently partition the original into smaller independent models. For a small problem involving about 10 activities, the solution can be obtained very simply by hand. An example is given to illustrate the approach.